


American Money

by PlotQueen



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-07 06:13:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7703611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlotQueen/pseuds/PlotQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>mem·o·ry (noun) 1. the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information. 2. something remembered from the past; a recollection.<br/>After waking up in a no name hospital in a no name town with a gunshot wound to the head, it’s not something he has much of anymore. That doesn’t mean he’s not going to try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	American Money

**Author's Note:**

  * For [futuredescending](https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/gifts), [Galahard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Galahard/gifts), [hartwinning](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hartwinning/gifts), [Whisper91](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whisper91/gifts).



> _American Money_ is by BØRNS. Not particularly brit-picked, but beta'd by the lovely LeafZelindor.  
>  For the pinchhitters <3.

**So take me to the paradise in your eyes**  
**Green like American money**  
**You taste just right**  
**Sweet like Tennessee honey**

 

It was a run-down little house, but it was home, whatever that was. He’d been living in it since his release from the hospital, his escape from the nightmares that any properly inhabited city was these days. They told him that he was lucky. They told him that he’d been in the middle of a terrible tragedy, and that he was lucky. He didn’t think so much, not when he didn’t even know his own name. Certainly the wallet they’d found on him had given it, but he didn’t remember, and he hardly felt like a Thomas or a Tom or a Tommy. They liked to shorten his name here, no matter how often he corrected them (if it was even correcting, maybe he _was_ a Tom or a Tommy or some asinine nickname he couldn’t currently abide). He didn’t like to correct them either, the comments on his voice and accent as awful as that name. he knew he wasn’t from here, he knew that this wasn’t home. But it was all he had for now.

The house had been bought for a song, the market having crashed after what everyone was calling V-Day. How awful that someone who’d done such great things had done something so awful, Thomas thought. It was impossible to say why any of the participants had bought into it, and when he really gave it effort there were things that wiggled inside his brain. But there was always an accompanying illness, a sick stomach that made him stop thinking on it, certain that it was awful and he didn’t want to know. Whoever he had been, Thomas was not them anymore. He was content with his little house in the woods, the land that came with it, the empty forest and meadows therein where he took his daily walks to maintain his health.

The house had actually been bought with the exorbitantly large amount of funds he apparently had access to, according to the identification and various forms of payment in his wallet. His fine but ruined suit, the expensive haircut, the signet ring and custom eyeglasses attested to it, even if the suit was made from a strange material, the haircut was ruined, the signet ring had a strange dimple in the back, and the now-broken eyeglasses had no prescription. They were all quality, they were all obviously expensive and tailored. They were all in a plastic box beneath the bed in the small bedroom of his little, run-down house.

It was small, but it was home. He thought he had probably never been further away from home.

 

He woke to the visceral knowledge of _hospital_ never once questioning how the merest scent, the smallest sound, the faint tug of bandage at his face, at IV to his arm all drew together to tell him that in under a second. He never once questioned that he knew that the hospital was, and that he didn’t like being there, that he never liked being there. When he woke, they told him his name, who he was, how he felt, all before he ever opened his mouth to explain that he knew none of it.

There had been weeks of therapy, two small surgeries to deal with the messy remnants of the bullet he apparently tried to stop with his face, and though his left eye was often hazy he could still see and did his best to be grateful. Thomas didn’t really think that he was often grateful for what in the back of his mind he continued to call sub-standard care. He didn’t think he was grateful at all when it was time to begin his physical therapy, to graduate from wheelchair to walker, from walker to cane, and to acknowledge that he would carry said cane for the rest of his life just to be safe.

He spoke in cultured tones, his opinions and knowledge base was wide. He could argue with the best of them, his head injury never once stopping him from causing as much trouble as he could, if only to go home all the faster. Until the day he realized he didn’t have a home. The address on his identification didn’t exist, or if it had it was gone now, and he had nowhere to go.

But he had everything else, and stubborned his way through it all to the little house, nearly in the middle of nowhere, staring at it like it was wrong. It was, completely. He could almost see the stairs and the hard wood and the tiny kitchen he should have, even if he couldn’t quite remember it, decades of forgotten memory defeated him often to the point that he couldn’t stand to be in it and took to the trees and meadows and the shores of the creeks and streams and lakes therein.

 

The dreams nearly undo him at first.

 

_Slick flesh against his, hands fisting into his hair. “Harry, please,” Eggsy begs where he has his lover pressed back into the sideboard. The martinis are all drunk, the bottles wobbling dangerously, the bare chest before him sinful and sculpted. He dips his mouth to fasten lips and teeth over one pert nipple, making his darling boy cry out, jerking his hips forward hard._

 

They’re always the same, at the heart of them. Him. Someone else. And skin. So very much skin, enough that he could almost taste it, the sturdy heft of muscle beneath it making him wake hard, hot and needy and half unsure what to do with it. There are the echoes of condemnation every time, but Thomas preferred to pay them no mind, shoving a hand down his pants to fist himself until he came, quietly, no names said because he had none to give.

 

The revelation that he’s gay, or at least bisexual with seriously homosexual leanings, doesn’t actually surprise Thomas. He hadn’t already known it, given that practically his entire memory had disappeared on him. But it did seem to make perfect sense the more he thought about it, that knowledge settling inside of himself. He rather thought of it as the first piece in a large, never-ending puzzle.

The second was an alarming predilection for alcohol. Scotch and whiskey preferably. He had a more than alarming collection of empty bottles in his bin every week, though he never seemed to get drunk. It indicated a very high tolerance, which meant he was either an extremely high functioning alcoholic, or he had a hell of a tolerance. Both were frightening. But he continued to buy the honey whiskey in droves, more frightened of not clinging to the memory that he couldn’t remember.

The third was that he loathed denim. Not that he disliked it, but he felt strange and foreign in it, and found himself gravitating to khaki trousers and proper slacks that he shouldn’t have roamed about a forest in but did so anyway.

The fourth was that he could speak several languages, not that he was sure what more than French was. He suspected German, was pretty sure on Italian. But he lived in Corbin, Kentucky. They spoke English, bad English, and backwoods in a charming mix that Thomas couldn’t find himself adapting to.

The fifth was that he loathed, absolutely utterly _loathed_ , country music.

 

_“My darling boy,” he murmurs as he sinks into the younger man, nosing along his jawline before kissing him deeply enough to taste the varied efforts at a proper martini. He moans, Eggsy does, tugging him closer even though they’re chest to chest, skin to skin, and he can’t possibly fuck himself any further into his lover._

_“C’mon, fuck me,” is the plea, and he does, exacting and hard, needing it just as much as his beautiful, golden boy needs, wrecking him until his mouth is gasping and sobbing, come smearing between them before he let’s go._

 

He woke again, the dream so vivid he could taste the skin and salt. He was hard, so fucking hard, but Thomas ignored it reaching for his phone and dialing blindly in the dark. There weren’t enough numbers, he wasn’t in the right country, but a voice answered.

“Customer complaints, how may I help you?”

Thomas sat there in the dark for a long moment, before whispering, “I don’t know.”

She was kind, gentle as she told him, “I’m sorry, sir, you have the wrong number.”

The line disconnected and his mobile went dark. Thomas stared down at it, but couldn’t help thinking that no, he really didn’t.

 

It was raining the morning he pulled the box back out, ignoring the suit. Even though it was laundered, thoroughly, repeatedly, there were still stains on it that he didn’t want to see. The white shirt had rusted spots at the cuffs, and on the collar. Early on he’d looked closely at all of it, but the strangeness had put him off. In the back of his mind he could feel a flash of golden hair, green eyes, a laugh and smile that lit him up with warmth and need. Thomas laid it all out, searching until he found the small ring and stared at it.

“A gentleman traditionally wears the signet on his left hand,” Thomas murmured, turning the shining golden thing over and over in his hand as he examined it. He had not, in fact, been wearing it on his left hand. Thomas had been wearing it on his right, his dominant hand, in a world that had designed it to be worn opposite.

He wondered what it meant, a finger tracing over the engraving at the surface. His nail caught in one groove, and Thomas studied it, shifting it around so that the steamship was right side up. It meant nothing to him, nothing at all, no matter how hard he pressed his mind for an answer. He sighed, not really having expected anything.

“I wish I could just order you to unlock your secrets,” he told all of the things waspishly, glaring hard enough to set the strange suit on fire and melt the rest. But his hands moved as he complained, the signet sliding down his finger in a way that was at once familiar and alien.

He stared at it, thumb sliding across his palm, again making him yearn for the reason it was nostalgic. Things changed the moment his thumb pressed to the back, the small dimple, and pressed, a crackling sound making the hair on the back of his neck rise. “…what?” he murmured, pressing it again and brushing a finger across the surface.

After that all he knew was bright, shocking electricity and darkness.

 

The honeyed whiskey was soothing to a degree, though not what he wanted. Money he might have, but he’s wasn’t even sure why he knew what the Balvenie 50 year tastes like, much less longed for it as one might a lover. Though, the more Thomas thought about it, the more he was certain he knew what quite a few of those expensive liquors tasted like. What even was his life, he wondered, staring balefully at the pile of things he’d been wearing when he’d nearly died.

The signet ring had electrocuted him. That was the long and short of it. The divot in the back was a contact of some sort, pressure activated, and turned it into a taser.

“What the fucking fuck,” he said, taking another swallow of the whiskey, wishing it burned more. It bore thought. And investigation. But not tonight. Tonight he was going to finish this glass, and pour a few more, and maybe pretend he’d not nearly killed himself. Again.

 

“Customer complaints, how may I help you?” Her voice was as mellow as the Johnnie Walker he’d poured an hour before. Thomas sighed, melancholy and unhappy, saying nothing.

She was brisk, asking again, and the disconnect was a palpable ache in his chest, making him want to sob out, to scream and yell and demands the answers he bloody deserved. Anything was better than this house, this town, this fucking life that was so foreign to him that he wanted to rip his eyes out and run away.

The brutality of the thought made him ill. Thomas poured another glass of Johnnie Walker, and took his time drinking it down. He did not stare at his mobile. He didn’t even glance at it.

 

_The door shakes when he’s shoved into it, a mouth going for his throat. He tilts his head back, lets his lover ravage him, wondering how he had ever thought he wouldn’t touch the boy. Months and months of time alone with him only cemented the attraction from physical to more, and now he can touch. Eggsy’s jacket and shirt are somewhere left behind, his belt already undone and hanging at the open zip of his trousers, jeans barely clinging to his gorgeous arse, those luscious thighs._

_“Harry,” he whines out when fingers only tease, refuse to take, instead let go and search behind him for the door knob. They fall into the room, a tangle of limbs on the floor with his darling boy astride him, his name said again, this time a benediction as he thrusts up, grinding his own cock into a matching hardness._

 

The suit was strange, the material not what it should be. He’d caught a ride into Lexington, spending two hours trapped with one of his neighbors and interrogated only to find that Lexington didn’t have a wealth of bespoke tailors. He tooled around what there was, actually making purchases in two shops and arranging to have them shipped to his home, before realizing he needed to think bigger as he searched.

To that end, he found himself asking said neighbor merely to make sure no one stole the packages that would be coming and booking a bus ticket to Louisville. A late lunch had him climbing aboard the Greyhound to spend another two hours wondering if he was a fool for even trying.

Louisville had a much healthier population if size was anything to go by, though the ravages of that awful day were more obvious. But Thomas found himself able to ignore it was an ease that was a little alarming, finding a hotel and booking a night so that he could continue with his mission in the morning. (How telling was it that his search for a fabric, as strange as that was in itself, had become an almost militaristic operation where Thomas measured his time, calculated distances and finances and smiled and charmed and woo as though his cock would fall off did he not get his answers.)

The next morning he checked out, having refreshed his clothing in the small bathroom with what was available, and went out in search. His search netted him no answers, not a one, but he did gain a small overnight bag, two changes of clothing, some toiletries that would be his own—brushing one’s teeth with one’s fingers was hardly gentlemanly—and another ticket, this time to St. Louis when his unhappy consternation was noticed and advice given.

The trip would be longer, the bus left nearly at midnight, but Thomas could sleep on it. He’d slept in many stranger, and less comfortable places, a piece of knowledge that fell into place in his mind and made him stand a little straighter, and perhaps a little more dangerously. He had no idea whatsoever why he would believe that, why he was so certain, but he wouldn’t question it. He felt more himself after that realization than before, making him stare at the ceiling in the bus for several long hours before he did go to sleep, wondering and hoping and praying a little though he wasn’t sure if he believed in a god, or if he worshipped.

He woke as the bus began slowing to turn into the station. By seven he’d washed up in the station’s bathroom facility, and by eight he’d broken his fast. By noon he was frustrated at lunch, and by the time he should have eaten dinner Thomas was certain he’d been mistaken. Surely the suit he’d worn could not exist. There was no way, he’d touched a thousand suits and fabrics, and none of them felt the same despite having similar pinstriping.

Instead of finding a place to eat dinner, he found a hotel, throwing money away for comfort at the Four Seasons. The view was divine, and he ignored it utterly, calling for room service and dining on an exquisite steak that he found far less appealing than the Guinness he sipped at thoughtfully.

He could almost remember something, the taste of it evoking memory in a way nothing had before. And when he thumped it down on the table, furious and flummoxed, the whole room changed for a moment. “Sorry about that,” he said, his tongue taken over as he stared across the table—the booth—and the boy, _his_ boy, stiff and alarmed, eyes wide and lovely as they stared at him.

It was lost again in a moment, making Thomas stumble for the loo to kneel and vomit out his fine dinner, the Guinness bitter and burning as it came back up. There were tears, also bitter, angry and hurt and just desperately scared. He knew him. He _knew_ him. And yet he couldn’t remember him, just the taste, the touch and smell. Not even a name followed him out of those dreams.

 

The ride home was long, arduous, and Thomas loathed every moment of it. His world felt aslant since the night before. He fancied he could still taste the Guinness, though he’d poured the rest of it out before ordering for something less nerve-wracking to accompany his second attempt at a meal. When he stepped off the bus in London he frowned, wondering why he would assume he should have someone waiting on him.

Instead he found a cab and ensconced himself and his bag in the backseat before giving his destination, and following it up with double what the fare should cost. It wasn’t a long ride, a bit more than half an hour from station to house thanks to the interstate, the late hour, and the lack of traffic, but Thomas was so glad to get there even if it didn’t feel quite right.

His packages were there; he only kicked them into the hallway with his foot, before closing and locking the door behind him. Everything was dropped to the wayside as he stripped carelessly on the way to his bedroom, and the shower, to wash the grime off of himself. Afterwards, clean and refreshed, if still exhausted, he settled himself on the couch in his front room, and stared at the things from his previous life.

He reached out and touched the suit, the navy pinstripe too smooth and coarse beneath his fingers, the dichotomy nearly driving him mad.

It could part beneath a blade, he thought. He wondered what else it would part under, and what it might not. They hadn’t told him details, but he knew his way around information finding (and why hadn’t that ever struck him before as a clue to his own mind?) and Thomas knew very well now about South Glade Mission Church, even if he’d no idea why he’d been there.

A church full of people, slaughtered to a person. Not a single survivor, barring him, found outside, with a single shallow stab wound, a single gunshot wound to his head, and no other injury but bruising. A great deal of them; he could recall the rounded hematomas across his skin.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow he could follow up on that.

 

(Thomas put the suit away with trembling fingers the next night. The borrowed revolver already returned to its proper master, an entire case of slugs missing somewhere out in the forest that surrounded his home. He put the suit away, pretending that he hadn’t spent all afternoon shooting at it with an accuracy he was also pretending not to have. He put the suit away, pretending that it had a great deal many more holes in it than the single slice where he’d been stabbed.)

 

He knew what she would say when he dialed the six digits, the strange double ring sounding as it didn’t here in Corbin. When she answered, she was calm, collected, her voice almost familiar now, and the cadence and accent so comforting Thomas wanted to weep. “Customer complaints, how may I help you?”

He didn’t say anything, staring at the water. He’d gotten himself lost out near Spruce Creek, and the bit of water he’d started staring at flowed dark and quiet before him. This time she didn’t simply disconnect, and her “Hello?” was sharp and jarring, and he inhaled sharply.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” he said, finally, his head bowing. The water was so peaceful; he wished he could feel that way.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, but this time her voice was softer, and even more kind, spurring heat behind his eyes.

“I know,” he told her hoarsely. “I have the wrong number.” This time he was the one to press _end_ and disconnect. His jaw clenched as he lowered the mobile to his lap, stared at his hands, the haze of his left eye thin today as though it were trying to apologize for his hurt.

Wrong number. The frightening thing was, Thomas was almost certain he didn’t.

 

He should have put the shirt away with the suit. The shirt was even more obvious in its awfulness, the rust colored blood making him wind it up into a ball and stuff it away then, when he realized that even if no one had said it, no one had suggested it, he was inside of that church. That blood wasn’t his. It wasn’t from someone outside, the person who must have shot him.

It was the blood of the people he had helped slaughter.

It bothered him both more, and not as much, as it should have.

 

He dialed them again today as he wandered, the woods breaking in places between tree and grass and open areas that the sun shone down on like something out of a fairy book. “Customer complaints, how may I help you?” He almost smiled, nearly able to recite the words along with her, the familiarity comforting.

“Can you tell me where you are?” he asked her, his voice surprising even him. She made him think of home, not as a person, she hardly was to him. But what she represented, what she sounded like. It was home, it was familiar, it was something he was certain he should remember.

There was a long silence before she finally replied, as by wrote, “I’m sorry, sir, you have the wrong number.”

“Please,” he asked, “please? I’m a stranger in a strange land, and I want to come home.”

There was another pause, and for a moment Thomas hoped. Then she told him, “Sorry, sir, wrong number,” and hung up. He fancied a bit of regret in her voice, as though she truly was sorry to have to hang up, and it made him want to call back, and make a real complaint, not that he thought it would ever go anywhere. He wondered if it was actually a complaint line, or if it was just somebody paid well to wait for idiots to dial phone numbers that weren’t phone numbers.

He shoved the mobile in his pocket and walked on.

 

It took three more days for him to make his way into the town library, the line ringing in the back of his head oddly. _Stranger in a strange land._ Google produced a novel by the title, and while Thomas hadn’t read it, he must have in another life, because he knew that line. Or perhaps it was just a pop culture reference that people might use without ever knowing where or what it came from.

The squat brick building was nowhere near as nice as the county library, but Thomas didn’t actually pay it any attention as he ghosted in with a nod to the old woman behind the counter and headed for the card catalog. He stopped when he realized that even here, in the middle of nowhere, the card catalog was a computer.

He was no stranger to computers, thank heavens, and found the book he was looking for. Heinlein was apparently a someone in science fiction, hence even the small library carried a copy of the book from which he had inadvertently borrowed the title. He collected it up, found himself a place to sit, and opened it to read.

He made it to the second line, to _Valentine Michael Smith_ , before the book tore in his hands as Thomas stared at his murderer, looked his own death in the eye and said, “Sounds good to me.”

He jerked in muscle memory, nearly falling over the back of the chair so violent was his shock. The book was in two pieces, and Thomas stared at it for a moment as his hands scrabbled at his face, at the eye he still had, at the line of scar beneath his hair trailing around his skull.

The old woman was staring but Thomas couldn’t think about her, couldn’t think about anything but the fact that he remembered dying, remembered killing, and he remembered—

a boy with pale skin flecked with marks, hair of gold that was silk under touch, and eyes that told Thomas that he’d just ripped his beloved’s heart out and threw it on the ground with such a cruel disregard there was no asking forgiveness.

_“I’m so sorry—”_

_“You should be.”_

Thomas didn’t know that he could be so cold, so cruel. But this, too, wasn’t a startling revelation somehow. He climbed to his feet, his eye throbbing and graying under memory, collecting the pieces of the book and staggering to the checkout counter. “I’m terribly sorry,” he murmured, producing a bill far in excess of the book’s cost and dropping it to the counter before making his escape.

His eye ached the entire walk home.

 

_“My darling boy,” he murmurs, pressing his lips in a semblance of a kiss to his lover’s temple where sweat still dampens it, and the golden hair all around. He smiles contentedly when Eggsy shifts a little, the sheet dragging across his own sated body, and tilts his beloved face up. His eyes are so very green in the moment, the dawn light just bright enough to make the bits of blue disappear. Eggsy tilts his head down, presses a kiss to Harry’s chest above his heart. He closes his eyes._

 

The glasses were strange to him. Damaged along the one side, making them sit improperly when he shoved them on his face, but Thomas thought it stranger that he had perfect vision barring the injured eye, and the necessity of reading glasses it caused. The lenses of these strange glasses were perfectly clear glass, no prescription whatsoever.

Even stranger, upon slower inspection with a magnifying glass he’d picked up at a shop in town, was the fact that there were wires barely visible embedded in the temple piece that had been damaged.

He didn’t understand how he’d not noticed it before, how no one had. Then again, he’d been the sole survivor of a massacre, and the signal had happened with a day. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so hard on the poor people who’d found them. He stared at the glasses before sighing a little, and getting up to fetch the small tool kit he’d picked up at the same time as the magnifying glass.

Four minutes later he realized that he couldn’t separate the temple pieces from the frame body because of tiny, tiny wires still connecting them. Scraping and chipping away proved them to run throughout the entire frame in a complicated pattern of colors and bundles, some hair thin, some daring to be as thick as a needle inside the glasses.

“I cannot deal with this James Bond bullshit,” he grumbled, scrubbing a hand over his face, and his good eye, before giving the small ball-peen hammer a look and picking it up. He huffed before setting it down, knowing that Merlin would kill him if he brought back yet another set of ruined glasses.

And then Thomas jerked upright, realizing that that? Was a name. A name of a person, someone he’d known. A strange name, to be sure, but it was a memory. It wasn’t his beloved, couldn’t possibly be, the feeling ‘Merlin’ evoked was full of love, but not intimacy in that way. A brother? Perhaps.

He stared at the glasses again, at the pieces of resin plastic he’d chipped away. Well, Merlin, whoever they were, would be desperately unhappy right now. He twitched his nose before going to find a plastic baggie and carefully swept the pieces, large and small and microscopic, into it before tucking it away with the suit as well.

Perhaps this Merlin would never need find out about them. Until then, Thomas needed a drink.

 

The grass was still damp beneath him as Thomas settled back. It had been overcast much of the morning, the hot Kentucky sun unable to dry everything out as it usually did. while the air was muggy with it all, he was comfortable in the shade of the trees on the edge of a small clearing. He’d dreamt again, though this time he couldn’t really remember it. It was loud, and then silent, and then nothing but a voice speaking to him, reading to him, begging him to come back.

He wasn’t really sure at all that it was a dream.

He settled back quite content, listening to the world around him. It was mostly quiet, the river running somewhere nearby, more vigorous than usual because of several days of rain. He could hear birds, a woodpecker somewhere hard at work. The soft swishing movements of something through the low brush in the trees. A deer, perhaps, or a fox or a skunk. Nothing that might hard him, or the noise would die.

It took him an hour to fetch out his mobile and stare at it before dialing the six digits again. this time when it was answered, the voice scared him in a way that Thomas wasn’t sure was proper.

“Customer complaints, how may I help you?”

It was deep, masculine, still cultured and with a cadence just like his own, accent and intonation proper and round. It wasn’t her though, and the change made him inhale sharply, his heart beating a little too hard for such a small thing. Surely his mystery voice couldn’t answer a phone all day, every day, year round.

“Who are you?” he asked. Demanded, really, though Thomas didn’t care how rude he’d been, just wanted to know what happened, where she was, because she was kind, and regretfully impersonal, and this was just a voice on the other end of the line that made Thomas’ fingers twitch around his mobile.

“I’m sorry, sir, you have the wrong number.”

Yes, he did. but the call was disconnected before Thomas could do so himself. The discomfit had him climbing to his feet to leave the peace he’d found for a moment. It was terribly close to fear, and Thomas was tired of being afraid.

 

_“Harry.” His name is a gasp on his beloved’s lips, the exquisite body beneath him arching up, pale and glorious where he hasn’t worried marks into the smooth skin, clenching around him as he spills out. He wants to swoop down and take the spurting cock in his mouth, taste and savor, but he’s following his lover over the edge too quickly to do anything more than cry out, soft and startled, so wrapped up in pleasuring Eggsy that he missed his own orgasm beginning._

 

When he woke he wished that he could remember more. Instead it’s a blur of heat and skin and his darling, darling boy. Thomas rolled over, buried his face in his pillow, ignoring the erection. He just wished he could remember.

 

There were only two things left to examine; the watch, and the shoes. Thomas wasn’t sure which one to start with. It wasn’t as though he was under a deadline, nobody was coming looking for him much as he wished they were. He didn’t even rightly know who _they_ were. A name, a face with eyes the color of American money, two voices, and none of them related to any other. He had to force the sigh down. He was so very tired of not knowing.

Between the two, frankly, the shoes were less frightening, considering what had happened with the glasses and the ring. Thomas set the watch to the side on the arm table by the couch and settled the shoes on the coffee table. they weren’t what they once had been, that was obvious. There were scuffs, a few places that he was certain was dried blood, but the quality was obvious amidst that, a shine layered into the fine leather from what was probably years of careful care.

His fingers ghosted along the edges of the embellishing leather, noting that the leather was well dyed and stitched so evenly it nearly created the illusion of a single decorative groove. It was an oxford, the word now an identifying name dredged from the recesses of a memory he didn’t have, making Thomas harrumph a little in annoyance, shoving at the shoes in a moment of pique.

They tumbled, side by side from the coffee table to land in a jumble on the floor, hard heels clapping together. It was followed to quickly by a sharp snick of metal, and Thomas was grateful beyond words that the oxfords had fallen well clear of his own feet and ankles as he saw the blade protruding from the tip of the right shoe.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.”

Even in anger he couldn’t quite shake the accent in his voice, sounding too proper, too prim, to convey the level of disbelief he was currently at. Should have started with the fucking watch, he thought sourly, reaching down to retrieve both shoes, careful to keep his hand far from the blade.

Something niggled in the back of his mind about it, and if the Bond theme was anything to go by it was no doubt poisoned. He flashed for a moment to a room, well appointed, and walls lined with such things. Pistols and rifles and lighters that weren’t lighters. And shoes. Slippers and oxfords. And his boy, his beautiful boy standing there smiling at him.

“Oxfords, not brogues,” he murmured, closing his eyes and wondering why it seemed so important as he tried to catch the tone of his beloved’s voice in the memory, for memory it had to be. it came in spurts, recalling whatever they’d been discussing mostly only a word here and there. He remembered being smug, so very smug for some reason, and pleased, too.

He remembered also having his darling put a pair on, and the cheeky thing teasing him. “Ah,” he murmured. Poisoned, yes it was. And so he was doubly careful as he used the heel of the other shoe to force it back into the sole, waiting until he heard as well as felt the catch, before taking them carefully up and finding a box to put them in.

There could be no accidents, or he would never leave this awful place that definitely wasn’t home.

He wasn’t sure where that was at all, but was getting closer to finding out.

 

He didn’t bother with the watch. It probably shot poison darts, or electrocuted people, too. Thomas was quite certain he’d no need to risk either of those on his own person once more.

 

“Customer complaints, how may I help you?”

“I’m sorry, sir, you have the wrong number.”

“I really don’t,” he murmured, closing his eyes, hoping he was right. “Oxfords, not brogues.” His voice shook a little, low and coarse because what was he doing. This was a phone number that wasn’t a phone number, and strangers answering pretending to take complaints when all they ever did was tell him he had the wrong number. He wasn’t James Bond, he didn’t have an entire wardrobe designed to sneak, to skulk, to save his skin when he was shot at a dozen and more times.

He wasn’t—

He heard the catch in her breath, yanking him from his spiraling thoughts and despair. “Your complaint has been duly noted and we hope that we have not lost you as a loyal customer,” she told him, still nameless, still kind, and suddenly dear to him because whatever it was, whatever code he’d just used, she had known it. It meant something to her as it still didn’t quite mean to him, the pieces there, only a hairsbreadth out of reach.

Then there was nothing but a dial tone again, and Thomas found his breath hitching. It had been such a high expectation, he’d thought. He’d thought for a moment, _home_. The word was longing in his mind and his heart. Home was so far from him, he just wanted to there, where his darling was, and fix whatever was wrong with him and them, because he didn’t bloody belong here.

He threw the mobile across the room and buried his face in his hands.

 

It took him six hours to crawl across the room, dial the number again, and realize that it didn’t exist. Whatever nexus had made a phone number from six digits, gave him something that he yearned towards, had broken apart with those three words, and the thanks for calling too often with nothing to show for it.

He dropped the mobile on top of the coffee table, and stared out at the darkness.

 

His was ill-fitting these days, all of the messy edges that had been so far apart before too close together for comfort. Thomas wandered, roamed, spent his days in the forest searching for something inside of himself that might smooth those edges and make him whole again.

He hadn’t yet. He was beginning to believe he never would.

The sky that had been overcast for hours looked to be readying a downpour; he turned back towards home, the word bitter like burnt coffee. This was home now, there was nowhere else for him to hope for. He’d given in once more, dialed the six digits, and found nothing in return again, and then…given up.

Twenty-four hours ago he’d had hope. He’d planned to make that call, say a magic phrase, and someone, anyone, would come and take him back where he belonged, and he could be whomever he was again. Now he was stumbling his way out of a forest in Kentucky, hoping he’d beat the rain, because there was nothing left for him anymore.

Except for the person standing on his porch, staring out at the forest where he was escaping it. Thomas’ breath caught.

The boy, the young man ( _my darling boy_ ) was standing there in his bespoke, hair too messy to be proper but just messy enough to imply a red-eye flight from far away, staring at him, and he had no idea what to say.

“Harry?” his beloved asked, voice soft and just as precious as the now clear memories. The sky opened up, rain pouring down, and everything shifted. The rough edged pieces he knew to be askance, missing, settled wrong, completely ruined, fit into place with a visceral scrape and crash. Harry smiled, tired and worn.

“Eggsy.”


End file.
